Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I thank the hon. Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst) for securing this important debate. I commend him on his speech, which went into a huge amount of detail on the suicide prevention training that is absolutely needed for our fire and rescue services.
Across the House we will no doubt agree that when constituents struggle with their mental health and reach out for help our mental health services must be robust and supported enough to deliver that. I draw the House’s attention to a deeply tragic case from my constituency. It brings into focus the devastating consequences of that system breaking down, which has deeply detrimental impacts. Last Friday I met my constituent Christine Meeking. She came to see me after losing her daughter, Nicola, to suicide. In the days before Nicola died, her GP tried on three separate occasions to reach Bradford’s First Response mental health crisis service but could not get through. Christine now carries the unbearable belief that if, from those attempts to reach out, Nicola had received the crisis support and care that she so desperately needed, she might still be here.
The failure did not end there. In my surgery last week Christine told me that, in seeking answers, she herself repeatedly tried calling First Response and was left on hold on the line for 40 minutes before the line cut out. She then tried to phone First Response back and waited for a further 48 minutes. Christine tried to get through for a total of 88 minutes. She made the point rightly to me that to anyone in crisis 88 minutes can seem an eternity. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened to her daughter Nicola.
After Christine shared her story with me, I raised the issue with the Bradford district care trust and wrote to the Department of Health and Social Care—I know that a Minister from MHCLG is responding in this debate, but that builds the case I will make: that this is a cross-Government and cross-departmental issue. The trust’s reply to the concerns that I raised on behalf of Christine Meeking was not satisfactory. It was a standard letter designed specifically to pass the blame. I wrote to the Department of Health and Social Care on 7 August, but I am yet to receive a response on behalf of my constituent. That is simply not good enough, especially when we are nearly at the middle of November. In that time, Christine has rightly asked if the system that we are expected to rely on is suitable and fit for purpose. Clearly, it is not.
Christine has shown extraordinary courage in coming forward and meeting me. She did so simply to get that point across. She told me that, although nothing can bring back her daughter, if speaking out can save just one family from going through what she has suffered, it will be worth it.
That brings me to the subject of the debate: ensuring that our fire and rescue services receive suicide prevention training. Nicola’s experience demonstrates just how critical the first response is, and it does not always come from a mental health professional. Increasingly, our fire and rescue crews are being called upon to attend incidents involving people experiencing suicidal distress, and they are often the first on the scene. In those critical moments, having the right training can absolutely save someone’s life.
Figures show that suicide-related incidents attended by fire and rescue services in England rose from 1,119 in 2014 to 3,184 in 2024—and of course those are not just numbers; they represent people in desperate need of help. Yet there is still no mandatory, standardised suicide prevention training for firefighters. I have met many of the firefighters operating across my constituency, and they have reiterated to me time and again that they would absolutely welcome that training, if it were available to them as standard.
As the hon. Member for North Durham rightly pointed out, Samaritans has called for protected time for firefighters to undertake this training, following the Government’s announcement of similar provisions for some police officers. I would like reassurance from the Minister that this will be rolled out to firefighters. It should not be a provision made for the police, but not for firefighters; all emergency services should be offered this training. This cannot be left to individual fire and rescue authorities; it must be a direction coming from the centre.
With incidents rising so steeply over the 10 years from 2014 to 2024, as the data I referred to shows, we are in desperate need of a robust and consistent national approach. I therefore call on the Government to introduce mandatory, standardised suicide prevention training across all fire and rescue services, providing in-depth, in-person and practical skills and knowledge. We must also get over the siloed approach that naturally, but unfortunately, exists within Government between one Department and another. To reiterate, in Nicola’s case, the service provision that she was reaching out for would ultimately sit under the Department of Health and Social Care, but this debate is being answered by an MHCLG Minister. We must remove ourselves from that siloed thinking and do everything we can to ensure that when someone does reach out, the first response they receive is the right one. I urge the Government to commit today to making that happen.